NAAC is a five-year project funded under the United States Department
of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
NAAC has four primary objectives: to bring together
and build on high quality, technicallly sound alternate assessments;
to demonstrate high quality design through our selected
partner states; to administer all types of alternate
assessments; and finally, to provide technical assistances
through high quality dissemination practices.

Tools for Alternate
Assessment

These tools allow for the examination of an individual student’s (particularly a
student with significant cognitive disabilities) range of instructional targets,
supports, and practices that allow appropriate access to the general curriculum.
These tools may be used to improve classroom instruction for students with significant
cognitive disabilities. The on-line training will provide participants with instruction
on the use of the tools and provide an opportunity to practice using video training
clips and related materials.
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Validity General Supervision Enhancement Grant (GSEG) Consortium

Alternate assessment is moving more firmly into a standards-based accountability
world, due in large part to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)
and the 2004 reauthorization of IDEA (Quenemoen, Rigney, and Thurlow, 2002).
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Learner Characteristics Inventory (LCI)

The Learner Characteristics Inventory (LCI) (Kearns, Kleinert, Kleinert, and Towles-Reeves,
2006) was developed by the National Alternate Assessment Center (NAAC) in order
to investigate the true learning characteristics of students participating in alternate
assessments based on alternate achievement standards (AA-AAS). The instrument was
intended to verify validity questions that extend our knowledge of the assessment
population to insure that 1) the test is designed for the intended population; and
2) the intended population is participating in the test (Kearns, 2006). The AERA,
APA, and NCME Joint Standards on Psychological Testing (1999) recommend
that “population(s) for which the test is appropriate should be clearly delimited”
(p.17). The students who participate in AA-AAS represent a highly diverse population
with varying levels of communication and other complex characteristics that impinge
on the assessment design and the interpretations that we want to make about the
assessment results. The LCI is designed to enhance the demographic data collection
for the test and when used appropriately, provide additional data to consider in
the validity evaluation for AA-AAS. The LCI should not be used as an assessment
device or in any other capacity where decisions would be made about students based
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